Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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I had a TRS-80 color computer that had BASIC built in and the first alternative language I got was a “editor/assembler” ROM cartridge.

By the mid 1980s they came out with an operating system called OS-9 which was a multitasking OS inspired by UNIX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9

You could get a few languages for that, including a C compiler. A lot of people were using C on CP/M so I would type in programs from Byte magazine. I wrote a FORTH (in assembly language) for OS-9 that was subroutine threaded and unusually had a C like API to access files instead of the block based I/O most FORTHs had.

By the late 1980s I had a 80286 machine and wrote a lot of Assembly, C and Turbo Pascal. I thought Turbo Pascal was better than C but switched to C when I got to college because it was portable to the Sun workstations they had. By the time I got to grad school I got a 486 and switched to Linux.

Personally I liked 8086 assembly a lot and even though the segmentation scheme it used could be awkward I thought it was fun to code.

I chose C (Turbo-C) because it was much better at strings than Pascal: specifically it had strdup() and their length was not limited to 255 characters. Also C had escape sequences- actually Turbo Pascal had them, not sure about standard Pascal.

I think earlier versions of Pascal had only fixed length space padded strings.

Yeah, 6809 and 8088 (arguably an 8-bit CPU) supported C just fine. The other 8-bits, not so much. I wish the CoCo had been a better computer than it was (crappy keyboard, not a real serial port, terrible video). My Atari 800XL was better except for its CPU.

Strings with maximum length are a bummer but null terminated strings have their own problems and are part of the whole "unsafe at any speed" nature of C.

The thing about the CoCo was that Radio Shack sold an absurd number of peripherals for it.

I got a "multi-pak" which would let me plug in four devices to the cartridge slot and I had a real UART for it. The built-in sound was awful but you could get an Orchestra-90, a speech synthesizer cartridge, etc. Most of the hardware and software at the time supported hardware flow control which made the bit-banger serial report more reliable than you might think at low speeds.

The video was a real problem, I think a lot of software didn't get ported to the Coco because everybody thought 40 column text was bad enough, who wants to deal with 32? For instance I never saw the Infocom games being available for the Coco although I found out just recently that Infocam had made a Z-Machine interpreter for it. Eventually they came out with a Coco 3 that had 80 column text and high resolution modes with a lot of colors but it was getting late at that point.

We (my friend and myself who had identical machines) managed to squeeze 64x32 (256x192, so the font (4x6!) wasn't exactly spectacular but it worked well enough for real use) out of the 'high res' monochrome graphics mode (PMODE 4) and that really made life easier.

The fixed string were a thing in ISO Pascal, most dialects had better string support, and even ISO Extended Pascal ended up improving them, although by then no one cared.

There was a UK clone of the CoCo that had a half decent keyboard, the Dragon 32 (actually: it had 64K if you tickled it just so).

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